Stefano, Abbé de Bernis, Thibaut Bechard and God

In a previous ‘Behind the scenes’ blog, we looked at how we had gone about representing that key aspect of eighteenth-century French society which was religion. One of the ways we did this was to include characters who either had an official spiritual role or were conspicuously religious. Three characters in this regard who are

Madame de Pompadour

Perhaps next only to Casanova himself, the most well-known figure in our novel, at least in the popular imagination, is that of Louis XV’s chief mistress, Madame de Pompadour. We’ve kept her role pretty faithful to what we know about her historically. She played a major part in the political, cultural and economic life of

The Encyclopédie

A fascinating Melvyn Bragg BBC podcast on the Encyclopédie, that embodiment of the Enlightenment and product of the intellectual hothouse that was Paris at the time (and which supposedly inspired Robert Damiens to attempt to assassinate Louis XV). However, good as it is, the podcast was broadcast in 2006 and does contain comments on

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